TECH TALK WITH JOHN RUDY: Searching is Not for the Faint of Heart

This month’s tech offering is all about the art of searching the internet–which is not really as daunting as it may seem.

Let’s start by getting a bit of terminology out of the way.

A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. The most common are Chrome and Internet Explorer though there have been many issues with Explorer so Microsoft is switching to Edge. But Edge is not ready for prime time. I suggest you all use Chrome though Safari and Firefox are good alternatives. Chrome has about half the market.

A web search engine is a software system that is designed to search for information on the Web, returning pages that meet specified criteria Google is the clear winner here. Bing and Ask are becoming intrusive and sometimes you’ll find them taking over (the subject of a much longer discussion.

There is a lot of data out there to search. The following snippet is old and is probably off by a factor of 10. BUT …. Luckily Google runs “web Crawlers” at night to make it easier to find data amongst all this.

It is expected that by the end of the year there will be a zettabyte of bytes moved every year. That is a million times bigger than a Petabyte. Most if not all of you use Google but it turns out that you can use it better. There are books and articles with hundreds of examples of things that you can do; I’m just going to mention a few.

Put your most important search term first

“George washington” (caps don’t matter) is NOT the same as George Washington. Putting quotation marks around the words indicates that you want to find the two words together in the page.

Take advantage of exclusion. “George Washington” –bridge will exclude all references that include the word bridge

Google makes a lot of smart guesses. Delta 1431 will get you the status of the flight. 02420 will get you the zipcode and bring up a map of Lexington. 781 will bring up the area code. You can even put in Fedex or UPS numbers. Put in Red Sox and you will get the information on the current game including a link for box scores, etc.

When you return a search, the words Search Tool is near the top. Click on that and you will see the words “any time” with a downward arrow. Click on the arrow and you’ll see that you can restrict the time range for the search. This is very important as it removes a lot of obsolete information.

For those with a mathematical bent, you can set up a Boolean Search, viz: snowmobile and (snowblower or Green Bay). But you don’t need the “and”

The asterisk is a wild card. The search for three * mice will allow any middle word

Definehappy goes out to the dictionary for the word happy. (I used that a lot when I was reading The Iliad.)

You can do math or currency conversion . You can even say 176 in roman numerals, and it returns the right answer. 1 a.u./c returns 8.31675359 min, with “a.u.” meaning “astronomical units” and c is the speed of light.

If you type in a location, you can get directions, a map, and markings for traffic problems. You can even ask for a walking or bicycle route rather than a car route.

You can ask questions: double quarter pounder with cheese has * calories

This is just scratching the surface. We could have a 1-2 hour talk on the subject!

BOLLI Tech Talker John Rudy

John, a long time computer expert and guide, provides his helpful hints in this monthly BOLLI Matters feature. In the comment box below, provide questions on searching or any other computer/tech topic that you’d like to know more about in future Tech Talk articles.